Brentford FC And Alt Coins – Are they related?
For those of us with a high existential level of angst, terror and nausea, tomorrow will be one of those days when we wish we had never read Camus, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Nietszche or Heidegger.
Because the famous Brentford FC will be playing at Wembley at 3pm on Saturday in a winner-takes-all match to ascend to the Premiership – the so-called £150 million game and this writer will be there with his son to try and enjoy it.
Brentford are not a glamorous team, for most of my life we’ve played in front of 4,000 crowds in the lower leagues until we started to go through the ranks about 12 years ago.
Twelve years ago. About the same time that a certain White Paper was published. We went on the rise around the same time as Bitcoin, probably the Manchester United of crypto. Forever volatile, thinks it’s bigger than it actually is, went down this week. Get my drift?
I was born two miles away from the Brentford ground Griffin Park and watched the last game there last March before we moved during the pandemic to a new stadium a mile away. I’ve been a supporter since I was a kid in 1975. I’ve been to 50 League grounds and I have been in Wembley and the Millennium Stadium when we’ve lost knock-out finals to the likes of Yeovil, Carlisle, Port Vale and Crewe.
Last year I would have been at Wembley again to see us lose to arch-rivals Fulham in exactly the same game after qualifying for the Championship play-offs… but you may have noticed the current pandemic.
Supporting Brentford and never winning a play-off final fundamentally rules my life; it’s the hope that kills you, but I really hope we win tomorrow. Please pray with me. It’s about time.
As forementioned, the likes of Brentford are unlikely to ever play in the Champions’ League, but it’s the ride that we love, the hope that a miracle might happen. When it comes to HODL, football fans have always known it, Brentford fans even more.
And as it is in football, so it is with crypto. Whether Satoshi Yakomoto was or is a Brentford fan is open to interpretation, but that 12-year thing is pretty weird; nearly as weird that an individual created Bitcoin.
But for every Bitcoin and Manchester United (or, whisper, Brentford) there have to be other currencies and teams. Ethereum could be Manchester City, Cardano could be Leicester City, Ripple could be Wolverhampton Wanderers, and those Premiership yo-yo clubs could be any cryptocurrency.
Fulham want to be Dogecoin, but they never will be… more like an eternal S**tcoin – not that I’m bitter.
But there are connections here. Football is notoriously fickle and volatile, some teams come from nowhere, others sink without a trace. Some have huge investment, others operate on so-called shoestrings. Even the fans are similarly evangelist or ever-cynical. Sound familiar?
FUD is also a staple of supporting a football club. Believe me, with 26 hours to go at time of writing, I have FUD like I’ve never known about the game tomorrow. Unfortunately, I can’t cash out or step back, the only exchange I can opt out of is if I don’t agree with our manager’s substitutions.
Alt coins will ulitmately topple Bitcoin and the current cryptocurrencies that want to be part of a separate Super League, it’s only a matter of time before technology renders Bitcoin as a hackneyed platform and only fit for speculation.
As for this writer’s obsession with his alt football team, there’s only one thing for it. Get to the ground, force a smile, put a funnel in my mouth and pour as much alcohol into it before and during the game hoping there will be no volatility, only an early goal for us and a walk in the park.
Fat chance.
As I said, please pray for me.
Monty Munford is a tech journalist and the Chief Evangelist and core contributor to the Sienna Network project. He also runs his own crypto podcast https://blockspeak.io
He WAS a keynote speaker/emcee/moderator/interviewer at prestigious events around the world until Covid destroyed his conference speaking career… until 2023. He has spoken at more than 200 global events.
He was previously a weekly tech columnist for Forbes in New York, the Telegraph in the UK and continues to write regularly for the BBC, The Economist, The FT and… City PM.